In her March 31st blog post Joanna Angel writes:

“So the people at Hustler are trying to tell me that they’re having a hard time selling Joanna’s Angels 2. Apparently the porn buyers and distributors just don’t believe in xxx movies about horny superheros. It’s really lame.”

What the fuck? Just three months ago I saw a 30 foot high poster of Joanna Angel lording over the main entry to the AVN convention hall, every week since then I’ve been asked by one journalist or another to offer my take on the New York alt porn revolution. Don’t tell me it’s over already? (FWIW, My take is I’m 40 years old and get nostalgic when I hear 80s hair metal)

Actually I think I know what the fuck.

We’ve been approached a couple of times by traditional porn distributors who’ve caught a whiff of the Comstock buzz and thought they might be able to make us all a little richer by distributing our work. In each case the ultimate outcome is that neither we, nor the distributors had any confidence that they knew how to sell our films.

In each case the numbers of units these outfits thought they could move for us were lower than the number of units we already move on our own. In each case it would have been bad business; bad for Comstock Films and bad for the distributor. And in each we and they said, “Hmmm. These figures just don’t add up,” and that was the end of that. No hard feelings, but no covetted distribution deal either.

The problem is that you don’t build a business to do things differently, you build a business to do what you do better, faster, more effectively. Comstock Films isn’t going to suddenly start making six scene double anal gonzo movies, Joanna Angel isn’t going to suddenly start making fresh-face cheerleader girl videos, and a company like Hustler, which has been making and marketing more or less the same thing to more or less the same audience for years isn’t going to suddenly figure out how to reach a different market. That’s just not the business that Larry Flynt built.

Probably most of the people who would groove to Joanna’s version of nasty would never go into the porn shops that Hustler counts as their customers. Certainly most of the people who enjoy our films won’t. And you’re not going to reach them selling films the same way you’d sell Barely Legal 16 or Anal Invasion 17. It’s not Joanna’s fault, and it’s not Hustler’s fault either. It’s just the way (I think) it is.

Now maybe I’m wrong. Ms. Angel as asked her internet army to descend on the porn shops of America and ask them “Where’s Joanna’s Angels 2. It might work. Every once in a while we get a note asking why such and such porn shop doesn’t carry our film, and our answer is always the same – ask them to. And more often than not that end up becoming an order from the shop in question. But for us those have been incidental sales. Presumably Ms. Angel’s can move a few more bodies than we could if we called for a mobilization.

I still think there’s going to be a revolution. But when it comes it’s not going to be real people real sex doco porn, or a funny haircut and a skull tattoo. That’s a change of pace, not a revolution.

When the revolution comes it’ll leave all of us, Comstock, Joanna, Hustler and the rest with pockets full of lint, scratching our heads and wondering what happened.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Joanna Angel, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.